Contrastive Analysis of Onomatopoeic Use in Nursery Rhymes as Children’s Environmental Sounds Recognition in Japanese and Indonesian Naila Nabila Rosyadi 1* and Nur Hastuti 1 1 Japanese Language and Culture Department, Diponegoro University, Semarang, Indonesia Abstract. Nursery rhymes play a role in children’s language development and help them recognize and express the environmental sounds or sounds around them. Onomatopoeia or imitation words are often found in nursery rhymes. Every country has a different language, so it has different phonetic sounds to express onomatopoeia. In this research, the author will contrast the onomatopoeic use in Japanese and Indonesian nursery rhymes. The theory and classification of onomatopoeia used in this research are combinations proposed by Akimoto (2002) and Kaneda (1978). This qualitative research used the listening and note-taking methods from Youtube videos. The analysis data used in this research are the referential matching method. The result from the research data shows that in Japanese nursery rhymes, onomatopoeia is the sound of nature, the sound from an object, the sound of a human, the sound of an animal, object condition, object movement, human movement, animal movement, and human emotion are found. Meanwhile, in Indonesian nursery rhymes found, almost all types of onomatopoeia in Japanese are found except for the class of the sound of a human, object movement, and human emotion are not found. 1 Introduction Music is sound from the human mind to express and communicate creatively [1]. Apart from being a way for the artists to express themselves, music also impacted the listeners. One of them is they had a good impact on children’s speech and auditory development. In that case, children can recognize the environmental sound or the sounds around them. Parents usually play nursery rhymes in human childhood while feeding their child, playing, or sending their child to sleep. Human speech and auditory development start when a human is six months old when they begin to recognize the phonetic system of their mother language. From 1 to 1,5 years old, humans begin to step into their lexical, which develops more at 2 and 4 years * Corresponding author: nnrosyadi@gmail.com E3S Web of Conferences 359, 03014 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202235903014 ICENIS 2022 © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).